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April 21 (Reuters) - Mehmet Oz, who heads the agency that runs the U.S. Medicare and Medicaid healthcare programs, said on Tuesday the Trump administration plans to ask all 50 states to revalidate Medicaid providers in what he called "high-risk" areas as part of an effort to reduce fraud.
Oz, speaking at Politico's Health Care Summit in Washington D.C., said that the audit will be announced this week and that the states will be asked to give the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services a plan to revalidate the providers over the next 30 days.
CMS is asking states "to make sure that legitimate providers are providing services that you're paying for, and doing it the right way," Oz said. "These are non licensed individuals - often in unsupervised settings. You have to provide some additional level of audit to make sure that this is legitimately a valuable effort."
He did not provide a definition of what he meant by high-risk areas.
Earlier this year, the U.S. paused the payment of $259 million of deferred Medicaid payments to Minnesota following an audit, saying the state allowed the theft of federal funds intended for social-welfare programs in the state.
(Reporting by Michael Erman and Chris Prentice; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama)
